Can't complain when the subject of your new book becomes a special issue of the New York Times Magazine and a Page One story in USA Today within 2 days. Debt, and specifically student debt, is definitely in the zeitgeist.
As befits the two publications, USA Today focused mainly on stories of young adults with way outliers of debt--6 figures for undergrad (average is $20K).
The NYT Mag, on the other hand, talked to almost no student debtors, but asked the 'big picture' question of how this debt affects individuals and society. Elizabeth Warren, a personal hero, commented sharply on the first: ""We tend to talk about student loans in the abstract, 'Ten or twenty thousand dollars -- it's not that much,"' she explains. "But I think it's really about what it means to be 28 and try to make loan payments and health insurance premiums and still put something aside for a down payment for a house. Think about how much extra room you have to have in your budget to cover those three things. Most can't do it."
I gestured at the second: "It's not about whether these policies are stopping these people from applying to college, though there is some evidence that they are," Kamenetz, a 2002 Yale graduate, says of the rising borrowing rates. "It's whether they're fair, whether they represent our ideals as a society and whether in the long term they're effective as compared to the policies of other countries that are pulling ahead of us."
BUT. The really, really important point neither of these articles touched is that crushing student loans are not some inevitable fact of life that will always be with us. They are an artifact of two and a half decades of terrible public policy, and they can be corrected by good public policy, and political will. Specifically, the federal government created a powerful moneyed interest in the form of the SLM Corp, better known as Sallie Mae, that controls a plurality of all student loans. Sallie Mae makes more money the more students borrow, and their fastest-growing source of revenue is collections from defaulted loans. I hope it's not bad manners to point out that their business interest, toward which they contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to PACs and politicians, is to allow student loans to continue to grow, to prevent competition, and to prevent borrower-friendly policies that cost them money.
Senator Hillary Clinton, after several months of consultation with student advocates, just introduced a fantastic bill --a Borrower's Bill of Rights.
Among other things, the bill would cap the total amount a student pays back, reduce the collection fees allowed to be put on the debt (which can now double and triple the debt), and allow for refinancing. The bill introduces income-contingent monthly payments and lower interest rates and fees, bringing our system more in line with those in other developed countries. Most of these improvements would not be terribly expensive for taxpayers, because they would tap student loan profits.
I hope you will encourage Senator Clinton to make this a major part of her agenda.
I'll be presenting on student loans, Sallie Mae, and corruption at the Take Back America conference tomorrow, and I'll post again from there.